Summary: A recent study demonstrates that the mind utilizes the same neural network as normal languages to process artificial languages like Esperanto and Klingon. Scientists scanned the neurons of 44 listeners of constructed language and observed detection in language-processing areas when participants listened to phrases in their conlang.
This contrasts with computer programming languages, which engage various scientific reasoning brain regions. The ability to convey meanings about the real world, rather than how a speech develops, determines whether it engages the body’s language system.
Yet languages that are only a century old, like High Valyrian, activated the same neurological wires as centuries-old natural language. These results provide fresh insights into how a program in the human brain functions as a speech.
Important Information
- Similar Mind Network: Constructed cultures activate the same mind regions as normal languages.
- Meaning Over Evolution: A language’s capacity to convey concepts in the real world affects its neurological processing.
- No Like Code: Development languages activate distinct brain regions, unlike normal and conlangs.
Origin: MIT
A system of areas within the human brain has evolved to practice language. When people listen to their native tongue or another language that they are proficient in, these parts are frequently activated.
A new study by MIT researchers finds that this network also responds to languages that are completely invented, such as Esperanto, which was created in the late 1800s as a way to promote international communication, and even to languages made up for television shows such as” Star Trek” and” Game of Thrones”.
To examine how the brain reacts to these unnatural dialects, MIT neuroscientists convened roughly 50 loudspeakers of these languages over a single trip.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging ( fMRI ) to demonstrate that participants ‘ brain regions lit up when they listened to a predetermined language that they were proficient in the same way that those that were activated when they processed their native language.
According to Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research,” we find that constructed languages pretty little recruit the exact system as normal languages, which suggests that the key feature that is necessary to engage the system may have to do with the kinds of meanings that both kinds of languages can express,” the senior author of the study says.
The results help to identify some of the essential properties of vocabulary, the researchers say, and suggest that it’s not needed for languages to had obviously evolved over a long period of time or to have a large number of speakers.
Saima Malik-Moraleda, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the paper, which appears this week in the , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says it helps us narrow down this question of what a language is and how to do it empirically.
Concluding the Conlang community
Unlike natural languages, which evolve within communities and are shaped over time, constructed languages, or” conlangs”, are typically created by one person who decides what sounds will be used, how to label different concepts, and what the grammatical rules are.
Esperanto, the most widely used conlang, was written in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhok with the intention of making it a universal language for international communication. Around 60, 000 people worldwide are reportedly proficient in Esperanto right now.
In , previous work, Fedorenko and her students have found that computer programming languages, such as Python — another type of invented language — do not activate the brain network that is used to process natural language. Instead, people who read computer code rely on the so-called multiple demand network, a brain system that is frequently recruited for challenging cognitive tasks.
Fedorenko and others have also looked into how the brain responds to other stimuli that are similar to language, such as music and nonverbal expressions like facial expressions and gestures.
” We spent a lot of time looking at all these various kinds of stimuli, finding again and again that none of them engage the language-processing mechanisms”, Fedorenko says. What does it then become that natural languages do not have that none of those other systems do?
The researchers were led to wonder whether artificial languages like Esperanto would be processed more similarly to natural languages or more similarly to programming languages. Similar to programming languages, constructed languages are created by an individual for a specific purpose, without natural evolution within a community.
Conlangs and natural languages, in contrast to programming languages, can be used to convey ideas about the state of the outside world or the speaker’s internal state.
The researchers invited speakers of Esperanto and other constructed languages to MIT for a , a weekend conference , in November 2022 to learn how the brain processes conlangs.
The other languages included Klingon ( from” Star Trek” ), Na’vi ( from” Avatar” ), and two languages from” Game of Thrones” ( High Valyrian and Dothraki ). There are texts available for all of these languages for those who want to learn them, and there is a Duolingo app for Esperanto, Klingon, and High Valyrian.
” Over the course of a weekend, we collected all the data,” says Malik-Moraleda, who co-led the data collection effort with former MIT postbac Maya Taliaferro, a PhD student at New York University.” It was a really fun event where all the communities came to participate.
During that event, which also featured , talks  , from several of the conlang creators, the researchers used fMRI to scan 44 conlang speakers as they listened to sentences from the constructed language in which they were proficient. The co-authors of these languages, who are also co-authors on the paper, contributed to the writing of the sentences that were given to the participants.
The participants also performed some nonlinguistic tasks for comparison while being compared while listening to or reading sentences in their native languages. The researchers found that when people listened to a conlang, the same language regions in the brain were activated as when they listened to their native language.
common characteristics
According to the researchers, the findings help identify some of the key characteristics that are crucial for recruiting the brain’s language processing regions. One of the main characteristics driving language responses seems to be the ability to convey meanings about the interior and exterior world— a trait that is shared by natural and constructed languages, but not programming languages.
” All languages express ideas about the inner and outer worlds, both natural and created,” the statement continues. They refer to events, properties of objects, and objects in the world,” according to Fedorenko.
” Whereas programming languages are much more similar to math. A programming language is a symbolic generative system that allows you to express complex ideas, but it is self-contained because the ideas are largely relational and are unrelated to the everyday world we live in.
Some other traits of natural languages, which are not shared by constructed languages, don’t appear to be required to provide a response in the language network.
” It doesn’t matter whether the language is created and shaped over time by a community of speakers, because these constructed languages are not”, Malik-Moraleda says. Conlangs that are just a decade old engage the same brain regions as natural languages that have existed for many hundreds of years, regardless of how old they are.
The Logical Language Group created a conlang called Lojban in the 1990s to prevent ambiguity in meanings and promote more effective communication, and Fedorenko’s lab is now planning to study how the brain responds to it.
Funding:
The research was funded by MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, the Simons Center for the Social Brain, the Frederick A. and Carole J. Middleton Career Development Professorship, and the U. S. National Institutes of Health.
About this news about neuroscience research and language
Author: Sarah McDonnell
Source: MIT
Contact: Sarah McDonnell – MIT
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
” Constructed languages are processed by the same brain mechanisms as natural languages,” according to Evelina Fedorenko and colleagues. PNAS
Abstract
Constructed languages are processed by the same brain mechanisms as natural languages
What makes up a language?
Natural languages have similarities to other fields, including math, music, and gesture. However, the brain mechanisms that process linguistic input are highly specialized, showing little response to diverse nonlinguistic tasks.
Conlangs are examined in this paper to find out whether they draw on the same neural mechanisms as natural languages or whether they instead pattern with domains like math and programming languages.
We demonstrate that understanding conlangs recurs from the same brain regions as natural language comprehension by using individual-subject fMRI analyses.
This result holds for Esperanto ( n = 19 speakers ) and four fictional conlangs]Klingon ( n = 10 ), Na’vi ( n = 9 ), High Valyrian ( n = 3 ), and Dothraki ( n = 3 )].
Conlangs and natural languages share important characteristics that allow them to draw from the same representations and computations used in the left-lateralized network of brain areas, according to these findings.
Conlangs ‘ characteristics, such as the recent creation by a single person, frequently for an esoteric purpose, the small number of speakers, and the fact that these languages are typically learned in adulthood, do not appear to be consequential for the reliance on the same cognitive and neural mechanisms.
We argue that the critical shared feature of conlangs and natural languages is that they are symbolic systems capable of expressing an open-ended range of meanings about our outer and inner worlds.
